1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a file management apparatus for an IC card incorporating an IC chip having a nonvolatile memory and a control element such as a CPU for controlling the nonvolatile memory, which apparatus serves to manage a plurality of files separately set in the memory.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, as a portable data storage medium, an IC card incorporating an IC chip having a nonvolatile memory and a control element such as a CPU for controlling the memory has received a great deal of attraction.
The IC card of this type is known in U.S. Pat. No. 4,985,615 having a memory whose memory area is divided in correspondence with a plurality of files. In each file, data or the like required for performing a corresponding application is stored. When an application identification name is input from a terminal device in which the IC card is inserted, the IC card can be set in a state in which only a corresponding file can be selectively used. In this manner, when a plurality of application data are divided and stored into files provided in one IC card, the IC card can be multi-purposely utilized.
In some application, a specific IC card must be inhibited from being used by the user of this IC card. For example, in a credit application, when a card user is written on a black list, the use of this card by the user must be inhibited in the credit application.
When the method described above is used, with an increase in the number of users written on the black list, the amount of operation performed to check IC cards increases. In particular, when this application is employed world-wide scale, a black list to be referred to becomes enormous so that the amount of operations required to check IC cards conspicuously increases.
For this reason, the following method is considered. That is, in each IC card, access to a file corresponding to an application whose use must be limited is forcibly inhibited to make reference of the black list unnecessary.